Cursewords

Hola! people at unRAID. I'd like to make this as short and sweet as possible. Basically I am unhappy with FreeNAS at the moment and I'm not liking the fact that I seem to be told constantly that what I want to do on FreeNAS is not possible, or at least is not possible without a lot of messing about for mediocre success. I popped onto /r/homelab and a lot of people pointed me straight in the direction of unRAID. Great! After checking some Youtube vids everything looks like a whole metric ton easier to set up than FreeNAS and there's a huuuge amount of plugins that look really useful. The only one I couldn't see was for setting up a PiHole, but someone on the forums seems to have forked the project to unRAID and people say that it works: PiHole on unRAID So here I am with a list of things that I absolutely need to have on my machine, and a couple of questions about whether or not this is possible with unRAID. ____________________________________________________ First of all my server: HP MicroServer Gen8 Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1265L v2 @ 2.50GHz Quad-Core 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC RAM 2x 4TB WD Red Drives Currently I have no SSD available for cache. So I'd be interested in whether or not I can still get sequential copy speeds of about 100MB/s, as I currently can get that with a wired connection to FreeNAS from my PC. Do I absolutely need a cache SSD to saturate my gigabit line? If so, how big? Here's the list of things I absolutely need to do with my server: A common Windows/Samba NAS accessible from my other computers A framework that isn't too hard to automatically backup Nextcloud storage set up for syncing from my phones Transmission / Deluge or rTorrent client An auto-download daemon to use with the above torrent client (like irssi-autodl or something better if such a thing exists) A PiHole to block ads across the entire network on all devices Additionally it would be nice to be able to set up in the future: Plex Plexpy something else, dunno what Can unRAID accomplish all of this, either via the base OS or through community plugins? All of the first list conditions are mandatory for me, inc. the auto-download daemon, PiHole etc. I hate to say but please give me a realistic answer here, if something simply won't work or isn't a good idea on unRAID. I'd really like to know. Secondarily I can't at this time set anything up on another machine and honestly with the specs I have in this server, I shouldn't even have to consider that option. Small bonus if you can tell me the advantages of unRAID over Open Media Vault. Finally, if I need some extra hardware or something else, like a good USB stick for the OS, cache drive or some kind of PCIe card etc. please let me know. Thanks guys, hopefully someone can help me out.